crucial webapp v. localapp point passed

by phil on Saturday Apr 30, 2005 10:49 AM

dunno why i'm talking tech this morning, but on another note, i felt a critical point passed when i discovered that a popular web app actually beat out a local net app.

GMail beats Outloook.

GMail loads faster. I always have firefox open, so clicking on the Gmail bookmark brings up my email in about a second. Outlook takes like a year to open up.

Not only that, Gmail takes no memory on my part, Outlook eats up my system resources.

Add to that Outlook's search is clumsy, Gmail's is magic. And Gmail is more than just an email client, but 2GB of space and intuitive threading of conversations. I've never been a fan of email threading in regular apps, but Gmail gets it right. Plus, if I lose my computer, I don't lose my email.

They used to say that web-based apps would never be preferred to local apps because of how snappy local apps are, but here is a clear case where the opposite is true.

ALL HAIL AJAX RUBY ON RAILS WEB2.0 BLAH BLAH

Comments

thompson_gunner said on May 2, 2005 5:28 AM:

This is possibly microsofts greatest fear.

Did you notice that they froze web browser development at IE6 -- this is cuz they realize that we were (are?) heading to "all you need is a PC that runs a web browser" paradigm.

Do you think Google will come out with a google-desktop? edit docs, spreadsheets and whatever from your web-browser and documents live on Google harddrive.